Fuck this "we need more women in [cushy job]". Why is there no call for representation in men among primary school teachers, childcare facilities, nursing, etc.?

The hypocritical nature of these "employment problems" really irritates me. Nobody wants equal representation of women in male-dominated but less-desirable roles (e.g., factory workers), and nobody cares about male representation in roles where it is lacking at all.

Most egregious about this is people have this biased, naive, unscientific view that "men and women are equal in rights, thus in any given role we should expect roughly 50% men and 50% women". Why does nobody actually address the question of what distributions should really look like in an ideal society? Why do people ignore the countries which better provide equal opportunities and yet see more unequal gender proportions in certain roles (Norway being the prime example of this)? If we are striving for statistics which don't match the ideal reality, you'll be shoehorning people into roles they don't want and excluding those who wanted them all for the sake of pretty (and fudged) statistics.

tl;dr - let people be what they want to be (which includes providing the opportunities). Don't strive for a number made by policies which ignore reality.

Not a fan of this, you can want that all you like but realistically it shouldn't happen, it should be best qualified and that is more likely to be weighted to men or to women rather than some nice roughly even split.

I would like to know myself actually. It's a strange disconnect they have when it's said "we must have more [insert who] in [insert field]" but maybe it's not an attractive proposition for those people rather than a huge number crying out for the roles but being overlooked.

A priori that isn't necessarily true, but it tends to happen in competitive roles. A phenomenon you can sometimes find in data about performance in some task/activity is that men and women can have comparable average performance, but men tend to have higher variance than women. This means if you're looking for the best-of-the-best, you are more likely to find men than women (and the same is true for worst-of-the-worst).

Taking this phenomenon for granted, even in a perfectly equal-opportunity society without social biases, the hiring policy "best candidate gets the job" might see a higher proportion of men in these jobs.

So if the above really is true, we could have a conflict between equal gender opportunity and allowing employers to only hire the best available candidates.

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